By some distance, my favourite part of Elon Musk’s periodic SpaceX rocket launch events is the permanently present audio of the company’s cheering fans, or employees, or both. If you’re a luddite like me, then the noise from the crowd, piped in over the commentary, is an immediate guide to whether the thing is going well or badly. A rogue flame emerging from the side of a rocket might be a disaster, or it might be entirely planned – you’ll know by the noise that comes from the onlookers. When the thing is going well, as it did yesterday, you’ll be in no doubt that it is, just from listening to the noise:
Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster! pic.twitter.com/6R5YatSVJX
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) October 13, 2024
Those cheers do not just provide an indicator of whether things are going well or badly: They also provide a reminder that you are watching something of significance and importance. Yesterday, when that rocket landed, those of us who watched saw a feat that had never been achieved in human history, but will certainly happen many more times in future. It was not unlike what it might have been to watch the Wright Brothers take their first powered flight in their flying machine, which lasted all of 12 seconds and travelled all of 120 feet.
Yet there’s more to it than simply watching history unfold. Regular readers will know that this author is not a particularly religious, or spiritual person. Yet it is undeniably true that there is something in the human condition, or the human soul that separates us from other living creatures.
Dogs, so far as we know, do not seek the ability to fly, and Elephants have never considered building submarines to plunge the deepest abyss of the oceans. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, most animals do not progress beyond the third rung – physiological needs, safety needs, and social needs. Certainly, humans are the only living species yet detected who might reach self-actualisation and transcendence, right at the very top of the pyramid.
In his now revered speech after the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, US President Ronald Reagan – speaking words crafted by Peggy Noonan – concluded his remarks with a famous line:
We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.”
For most people, the emotion and power of that line is concentrated in the last five words – “to touch the face of god”. Yet I think the key idea has always been the one preceding it: That those who journeyed to the heavens and did not come back that day “slipped the surly bonds of earth”.
The earth, in that phrase, is a prison that keeps humanity in a form of bondage. It limits us, because it is our sole supplier of the air we need to breathe, the water we need to drink, and the food we need to eat. The spaceman is a jailbreaker; an escapee; and we root for him (or her) in the same way that we root for Andy Dufresne in Stephen Kings’ Shawshank Redemption. We’re trapped here, on this relatively small – in cosmic terms – rock, for reasons we do not truly understand.
Musk has said that his goal is to reach Mars. Whether he will achieve it in his lifetime – or yours and mine – is entirely uncertain, and you’d be a brave person to bet on living to see it. Yet it is a racing certainty that this is a goal that will be achieved, at some point. After Mars, logically we might expect to see human attempts to reach the riches of the asteroid belt, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, but absolutely none of us will be alive for that.
This is why, I think, those cheers (and indeed the groans when things go wrong) are so powerful. At the very top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is transcendence. Maslow himself described that as follows: “Transcendence refers to the very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos.”
It also relates back to the concerns of the world: Fights over tax rates and migration patterns and gendered bathrooms – or even over strips of land in the middle east or eastern Ukraine – pale into relative insignificance when cast alongside the longer story of mankind’s journey from the caves to the stars. Musk is giving us “bigger picture” stuff: Stories and tales that will outlast this lifetime and place our era into real historic significance. When we watch that rocket return from space and land safely, we are watching a waypoint in human history that is likely to be taught in schools thousands of years from now, assuming humanity is still here. If – as is so often said – you only truly die when the last living person forgets their final memory of your existence, then Musk and his team are achieving a form of immortality akin to that of Christopher Colombus or the Wright brothers.
There is a temptation, amongst the cynical, to write all of this off as the folly of the rich. In some places, there is a cottage industry of actively bemoaning this kind of exploration as a wholly selfish alternative to curing world hunger, or spending billions of dollars to cure cancer or aids or any one of a dozen other earthly afflictions. All of that is short-sighted and wrong.
This is more than just the self-indulgence of a wealthy playboy: It’s a reminder that however bad things might get on earth, most of what we see and consume as news pales into utter insignificance in the context of the longer story of which we are all a part. I don’t always agree with Elon Musk, and there are times when his tweets drive me mad – but humanity is better off for having him amongst us, helping us slip those surly bonds.